 Some 80 years ago, Charles Fitzgerald killed a deputy sheriff
and was given a 100-year prison sentence as a result. He was released after serving just
11 years, and in 1926 murdered a California policeman. He was given "life" for
that killing, but was paroled in 1971.

 In 1931, "Gypsy" Bob Harper, who had been convicted
of murder, escaped from a Michigan prison and killed two persons. After being recaptured,
he then killed the prison warden and his deputy.

 In 1936, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported the
case of a Florida prisoner who committed two murders, received clemency for each, and then
murdered twice more. On March 17, 1971 Hoover told a congressional subcommittee that 19 of
the killers responsible for the murder of policemen during the 1960s had been previously
convicted of murder.

 In 1951, Joseph Taborsky was sentenced to death in
Connecticut for murder, but was freed when the courts ruled that the chief witness against
him (his brother) had been mentally incompetent to testify. In 1957, Taborsky was found
guilty for another murder, for which he was electrocuted in May 1960. Before his
execution, he confessed to the 1951 murder.

 In 1952, Allen Pruitt was arrested for the knife slaying of a
newsstand operator and sentenced to life in prison. In 1965, he was charged with fatally
stabbing a prison doctor and an assistant prison superintendent, but was found not guilty
by reason of insanity. In 1968, his 1952 conviction was overturned on a technicality by
the Virginia Supreme Court. He was re-tried, again found guilty, but given a 20-year
sentence instead of life. Since he had already served 18 years, and had some time off for
"good behavior," he was released. On December 31, 1971 he was arrested and
charged in the murder of two men in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

 In 1957, Richard Biegenwald murdered a store owner during a
robbery in New Jersey. He was convicted, but given a life sentence rather than death.
After serving 17 years, he was paroled. He violated his parole, was returned to prison,
but was again paroled in 1980, after which he shot and killed an 18-year-old Asbury Park,
New Jersey girl. He also killed three other 17-year-old New Jersey girls and a 34-year-old
man.

 A man convicted of murder in Oklahoma pleaded with the judge
and jury to impose the death sentence, but was given life instead. He later killed a
fellow inmate and was executed for the second killing in 1966.

 In 1972, Arthur James Julius was convicted of murder and
sentenced to life in prison. In 1978, he was given a brief leave from prison, during which
he raped and murdered a cousin. He was sentenced to death for that crime and was executed
on November 17, 1989.

 In 1976, Jimmy Lee Gray (who was free on parole from an
Arizona conviction for killing a 16-year-old high school girl) kidnapped, sodomized, and
suffocated a three-year-old Mississippi girl. He was executed for that second killing on
September 2, 1983.

 Also in 1976, Timothy Charles Palmes was on probation for an
earlier manslaughter conviction when he and two accomplices robbed and brutally murdered a
Florida furniture store owner. Palmes was executed for the killing on November 8, 1984. An
accomplice, Ronald Straight, was executed on May 20, 1986. (The other accomplice, a woman,
was granted immunity for testifying for the prosecution.)

 In 1978, Wayne Robert Felde, while being taken to jail in
handcuffs, pulled a gun hidden in his pants and killed a policeman. At the time, he was a
fugitive from a work release program in Maryland, where he had been convicted of
manslaughter.

 In 1979, Donald Dillbeck was convicted and sentenced to 25
years in prison for murdering a Florida sheriffs deputy. In 1983, he tried to escape. In
January of this year he was transferred to a minimum-security facility. On June 22nd, he
walked away from a ten-inmate crew catering a school banquet. Two days later, he was
arrested and charged with stabbing a woman to death at a Tallahassee shopping mall.

 In 1981, author Norman Mailer and many other New York
literati embraced convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott (who had murdered a fellow prison
inmate) and succeeded in having him released early from a Utah prison. On July 18, 1981
(six-weeks after his release), Abbott stabbed actor Richard Adan to death in New York. He
was convicted of manslaughter and received a 15-year-to-life sentence. Mrs. Adan sued
Abbott for her husband's wrongful death and her pain and suffering. On June 15, 1990, a
jury awarded her nearly $7.6 million.

 On October 22, 1983 at the federal penitentiary in Marion,
Illinois, two prison guards were murdered in two separate instances by inmates who were
both serving life terms for previously murdering inmates. On November 9, 1983 Associate
U.S. Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen told a Senate subcommittee that it is impossible to
punish or even deter such prison murders because, without a death sentence, a violent
life-termer has free rein "to continue to murder as opportunity and his perverse
motives dictate."

 On December 7, 1984 Benny Lee Chaffin kidnapped, raped, and
murdered a 9-year-old Springfield, Oregon girl. He had been convicted of murder once
before in Texas, but not executed. Incredibly, the same jury that convicted him for
killing the young girl refused to sentence him to death because two of the 12 jurors said
they could not determine whether or not he would be a future threat to society!

 Thomas Eugene Creech, who had been convicted of three murders
and had claimed a role in more than 40 killings in 13 states as a paid killer for a
motorcycle gang, killed a fellow prison inmate in 1981 and was sentenced to death. In 1986
his execution was stayed by a federal judge and has yet to be carried out.

 When he was 14, Dalton Prejean killed a taxi driver. When he
was 17, he gunned down a state trooper in Lafayette, Louisiana. Despite protests from the
American Civil Liberties Union and other abolitionist groups, Prejean was executed for the
second murder on May 18, 1990.